A library, to enable new class of measurements for mobile devices, Isolated measurements and incentives for researchers and developers.

The performance the user perceive depends on multiple factors, the phone hardware's ability, the 4g connection, the wireless connection, distance from cell tower...

Also some dynamic factors like when the user is moving, device power constraints, and so on.

The existing solutions to measure Internet performance from the user phones are lacking: scalability, consistency and coordination. Toward this goal, they designed Mobilyzer, a unified platform for conducting network measurements.

How it works

The mobilyzer architecture is quite simple, while there is a library to be integrated in developers app, there is a server that will deploy, receive and orchestrate measurements.
Mobilyzer also provides active measurement and coordination to avoid duplicate measurements, and most important is resource consumption management (so a task won't run unless its required resource or pre-conditions are available).
Mobilyzer measurements aim at providing realtime feedback to the researcher, to the carrier and to the app developer.
They aim at proposing a standardised open source solution that can be widely used by researchers as a reference to compare results between experiments, which is much simpler when they are relying on the same tool to collect these data.

Incentive Schema

Mobilyzer follows ad-library incentive schema, so developers or researchers that uses this library will get as much data as their users participate (instead of click to pay, the plan is participate to get data).

Imagine yourself watching a YouTubevideo on your mobile, and it freezes each few seconds, you will be experiencing disappointment from your Internet Service Provider (ISP).

Last month, We were in a meeting with an ISP, and the employees ignore the feelings that the users are experiencing. The ISP, proud for his quality, and all the years he spent on improving his quality of service.Hence, the ISP needs feedback from the user, a real time feedback, for a specific problem, in order to map the problem with that feeling.The ISP is doing like the security agent that keeps enforcing the door again and again, and ignores the windows, while the users are expecting a good experience, the ISP, give them a bad quality of service at a bad moment.When you are in a meeting your ability to tolerant a poor Internet quality tends to decrease. While when you are watching a YouTube video you always more tolerance.So the ISP needs to prioritize the Quality of Service depending on the user feeling (Exprience).

My PhD - explained

Quality of Experience

Quality of experience (QoE) measures total system performance using subjective and objective measures of customer satisfaction. It differs from quality of service (QoS), which assesses the performance of hardware and software services delivered by a vendor under the terms of a contract, Technopedia

The Quality of Experience for mobile Internet access is very important, and needs to be taken seriously by ISP, and needs to see the Quality of Service from the user perspective, because the mobile customers often tend to change their ISP, just because of the quality they are experiencing.

My Work

Here comes my work, with Romain Rouvoy - Inria Lille, and Isabelle Chrisment - Inria Nancy. We work are working on mapping user Quality of Experience with Quality of Service. We will be using the expertise of the sociologist Vassili Rivron - Inria Nancy, to estimate user behavior through questionnaire especially when he is experiencing a Quality of Service degradation, we will also detect user behavior through the mobile sensors with Apisense which is a crowd sensing platform.

About me

I'm Lakhdar - I am a developer; a PhD student at Inria Lille - Nord Europe @Spirals, University Lille 1 @Cristal, I am working on QoE of mobile Internet access, in my free time I work on Smart Farm Project, and I do some bloggings about my interests and places I visit. This blog is where I share all the things I love to you! Keep Tuned!